Tom’s Hardware: We Were Wrong About SSD Power Consumption

As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago, Tom’s Hardware posted a controversial article which claimed that SSDs actually use more power than traditional hard drives. Our own observations contradicted Tom’s original claim so we set out to do our own SSD battery life tests and posted our results, showing a modest improvement in battery life with the two SSDs we tested.

Now, Tom’s Hardware has published a new article with an apology. They claim, as many users noted at the time, that their original test method was flawed, because it caused the SSD drives in their roundup to work harder than their HDD counterparts. The results of Tom’s new test still show some SSDs eating more power than HDDs, but other SSDs, most notably the SanDisk SATA 5000 we also tested and an OCZ SATA II, using considerably less power.

Of course, Tom’s Hardware continues to use power meters for their tests to and while this yields very interesting results, we plan to continue our real-world testing with battery rundowns. We’re getting in a slew of new drives soon and plan a performance shootout.